Where’s the Progress in Progressivism?

From Daren Jonescu at American Thinker:

As we know from the climate change farce, progressives are never deterred by reality’s refusal to fall in line with the theories they use to justify their authoritarian advances. This obstinacy reveals the extent to which, contrary to honest reasoning, their political agenda determines their theoretical framework, rather than vice versa. Nowhere is this more evident than with regard to the most fundamental premise of progressivism itself, namely the repeatedly falsified mythology of “progress.”

The propensity for what we may call pseudo-theorizing has been at the heart of progressivism from the start. The nineteenth century spawned a mutant philosophical subset, intellectuals for tyranny, who produced ersatz scientific, moral, and even metaphysical arguments to persuade men that their desire for unlimited state power was in fact an unavoidable inference from an objective reasoning process, rather than the authoritarian impulse plain and simple. This philosophical mutation — reason as handmaiden of authoritarianism, rather than as its natural rival and limit — was made possible by the anti-rational turn in German thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most dramatically signaled by Immanuel Kant’s condemnation of previous Western philosophy as a “dialectical illusion,” in his Critique of Pure Reason.

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“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” —James Madison (1792)